The first video to share this Thursday comes from Gensler Los Angeles, an architecture, planning and design firm. They worked with Sci-Arc, The Architect’s Newpaper, and LA Metro to create Network_LA Transit, a short video that inspires Los Angeles transportation officials to focus on user experience, to create a more customer-influenced system of flexible, multi-modal transportation options. These visionary images and ideas are compelling and inspiring; understanding how actually to implement them is the next challenge Gensler should tackle.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/25688970 w=400&h=225]

Secondly, this video announces the 4th Advanced Architecture Contest for pilots in Barcelona, to “promote discussion and research through which to generate insights, visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.” The video itself doesn’t showcase much, so be sure to check out past editions.

In our Handbook on innovation in services and mobility in cities, we published comparative data on the cost and impact of digital vs paper tourist maps. One of our conclusions is that digital mobility costs 1,011x more than paper maps. The updated table below, reflecting the latest available data on global tourism in cities (2008), shows the scale of the burden roaming poses on cities.

Our data shows that, as an example, the 15 million international tourists visiting London in 2008 would have had to pay a total of EUR 102 billion in roaming charges to access the 22 million paper maps they collected that year. This is about 5x the total spending of tourists in London per year. Yet, the paper maps resource consumption constituted the equivalent of 19,000 trees - never mind the burden on dealing with the 1,600 hectares of discarded paper to the recycling systems.

But these numbers are fictional, since no tourist coughs up the EUR 4,550 per visit that these numbers imply. instead, visitors chose to disable data services and roaming, pick up a free paper map (subsidized by the local tourist industry), continuing to make use of all its functions: scribbling, asking for directions, sharing & tearing, and tracing their route. All that at a cost of zero Euros.

What then, has to change? In our book we argue that we need to fundamentally change the way we organise the cost of digital services in cities, eliminating roaming whilst adding significant commercial upsides to the operators to the tune of EUR 2 billion per year. Roaming is about 182x as costly as local data tariffs on prepaid plans, meaning that London could replace its paper maps for about EUR 560 million - or a mere 2.8% of tourist expenditure. These numbers do not take into account the efficiency gains in bulk-costs and data consumption by reversing our business models, which would reduce costs to around 1.4% of spending and could make London (or any other city choosing to become the first to tackle this issue) the first roaming-free tourist destination in the world.

Who would finance this? How about those that pay for the maps already dedicating a small percentage of their revenue instead to making theirs the most innovative and attractive tourist destination in the world...